Rich Dad, Poor Dad ? Even Robert Kiyosaki Is Warning That An Economic Collapse Is Coming

"In a total market collapse, why would gold be worth anything?"

Man has always needed some form of "standard currency" to trade with. I don't disagree that "Tools, fuel, food, seeds, water, guns, ammo." would be good for barter but there kind of hard to carry around with you all the time.

Precious metals have always been relied upon as a safe and mutual form of currency. Small amounts of silver, gold, copper, diamonds, are easy to trade with and are accepted by all. I personally think junk silver is a perfect currency for trading. Junk silver coins are pre 1964 US quarters, dimes and halve dollar coins. Right now a junk silver dime is worth over $3.00.

Yes you could got to a market and buy a chicken using a rake or perhaps a few 9mm rounds or maybe a tomato plant but it would be a lot easier to use that junk silver dime to buy a chicken. While your at the market you could use another few pieces of silver or an even smaller piece of gold to buy a rake, some ammo, and a tomato plant. Then perhaps you could go get a meal and pay with silver and perhaps leave a copper as a tip. It would sure beat buying your meal with a pint of gasoline and leaving a few nails for a tip.

You give excellent advice and points. This charlatan is giving bad advice based on ‘headline’ scare-talk.

Yes, there are risks. Every day there is something out there that could make the market go down. There is mixed bag of news - oil up too high, consumer confidence down too low, etc. But we move along.

“Listen, all you Chickens Little, even during the Depression — when the US economy arguably collapsed — there was food, there was fuel, there was order.”

There was also jobs, with 80% of people working, there was investments, in fact great companies that endure today were good buys then, precisely because it was hard times.

The people that got hurt most were those who bought at the top on margin and got wiped out as the stock market fell by 90%.

If you have a balanced bond/stock portfolio that is well-diversified, keep ready money for emergencies, and are frugal and stay out of debt and not to extended in your lifestyle (eg dont buy a house that you lose to foreclosure in the event you get a pay cut etc), you can survive ‘hard times’.

And if you get to the bottom - check your last penny and what’s written on it ... IN GOD WE TRUST. Put your trust in the Lord and the vagaries of human experience will be of no large concern.

I listened to Dave Ramsey a lot when he first came onto the NY radio market several years back. Now I don’t think he’s on at all here. His message was, to me, both commonsensical, and had nearly revolutionary potential.
His overwhelming emphasis was on GET OUT OF DEBT COME HELL OR HIGH WATER, AND DO IT ASAP! He also shot through his message with a healthy dose of Christian principles, and sometimes would ask a caller “So, how are you with this debt MORALLY?” I woulda thought Ramsey would become MUCH bigger with the economic collapse started 2 1/2 years ago, but the opposite seems to have happened: it didn’t matter so much if you paid off all your debt-—banks were only too happy to take your money, though they still needed bailouts ANYWAY,the government is still accumulating debt in your name, and your children’s name, and you’re having a much harder time getting any credit, which you’re going to need since that same Government has either destroyed your livelihood or put it at risk.

I often wonder what kind of life a person must lead who spends hundreds of hours trying to tear others down, while at the same time selling his own stuff as he does it...

[I have no overarching opinion or RK. Some things in his books are great, some are unclear or wrong. I have my own “rich dad” who has mentored me. I also have my “bio-corporate dad”. I’ve learned from both. ]

I often wonder what kind of life a person must lead who spends hundreds of hours trying to tear others down, while at the same time selling his own stuff as he does it...

If the people he is tearing down are charlatans, and the advice he gives is generally good, then there is nothing wrong with this, and he is in fact performing a public service as well as giving people value for the money they spend on his books.

I recommend reading everything Reed has to say about Kiyosaki (and some of the other "gurus") with an open mind and forming your own opinion if what he says has merit.

You might also want to check out his general piece on real estate B.S. detection and see if there is anything in there with which you disagree.

Listen, all you Chickens Little, even during the Depression — when the US economy arguably collapsed — there was food, there was fuel, there was order.

Nothing is going to “collapse” the economy — or civilization — absent plague, nuclear holocaust, or world war. In short, the end of the world.

While you may be right that everything won't collapse, you are ignoring several important things. First, the Great Depression was not an economic collapse. It was not, actually, that severe a depression, by historical standards. So using that as a worst case scenario is misleading.

More importantly, the world has changed dramatically since the 1930s. Since you mentioned food, look at the difference in food distribution between then, and now. Then, most individuals had a sizable amount of raw food on hand. I have seen guesstimates that 6 months or so was the norm. Now, that number is measured in days (2 weeks at most). But it is not just households. The typical can of green beans would have been years old before the 1930s consumer bought it. It would have spent those years in storage, somewhere. Now, the can of green beans that you buy today is only weeks old. What this means is that at any given point in time, there was a huge amount of food sitting out there, in the pipeline, so to speak, waiting to be bought. Today, that stockpile of food is essentially non-existent.

And the same pattern is true in just about every industry, from food production, to the manufacture of widgets. This means that there is no stockpile of stuff "out there", on either a personal level, nor in the economy, to provide supply during a full economic collapse.

Society has evolved, especially over the last 40 years, in response to the massive changes in production, delivery, and finances. Maybe none of this matters, in the end. But if there is a full economic collapse (not like what we saw in the 30s), it is fairly easy to see how most of society would fall apart almost immediately.

And "order"? If food supply is disrupted (which would happen almost immediately, in the case of a full-blown credit crisis), the food would run out in NYC within days. While I have enormous respect for the police, the idea that order would be maintained is simply unrealistic.

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